Prevalence of Rifampicin-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis by CBNAAT in a Tertiary Care Hospital of West Bengal, India

Abstract

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) remains one of the commonest infectious diseases in India, where control is difficult due to theemergence of multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). The rifampicin resistance (RR) is an important surrogate marker of MDR-TB.Aims and Objectives: The aim of this article is to determine the prevalence of RR-TB among all symptomatic presumptive TB patientsby cartridge-based nucleic acid amplification test (CBNAAT) in our institution. Materials and Methods: A retrospective crosssectionalstudy was conducted from January 2018 to December 2020 in the Directly Observed Treatment (DOT) center of a tertiarycare hospital. All presumptive cases of pulmonary TB patients coming to the DOT center were subjected to CBNAAT by GeneXpertMycobacterium tuberculosis rifampicin (MTB/RIF) (Cepheid). Data were collected from a data-extraction sheet from registrationbooks and analyzed using SPSS version 20. Fisher’s exact test was applied to examine the association between categorical variablesand P-value less than 0.05 was considered significant. Results: A total of 6171 presumptive TB patients were included in the study. Theoverall prevalence of TB was 1590 (25.77%) in all age groups. The prevalence of RR-TB among all confirmed TB cases was 10.75%(171/1590) with the majority being males (130 cases). The prevalence of RR cases among new and previously treated was 3.1% and36.34%, respectively, which were statistically significant (P < 0.05). Conclusion: We found that RR-TB is still much prevalent in ourarea, and it was significantly higher in previously treated cases. The CBNAAT is a good molecular assay method for rapid detectionof TB and also for the detection of RR-TB.